I recently went for coffee with a very interesting gentleman who had previously been responsible for threat and vulnerability management in a global bank – our conversation roamed far and wide but kept on circling back to one or two core messages – the real fundamental principles of information security. One of these principles was “know your assets.”

Asset management is something that many CISO tend to skip over, often in the belief that information assets are managed by the business owners and hardware assets are closely managed by IT. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that either of these beliefs is true to any great extent.

Take, for example, Anonymous’ recent hack of a forgotten VM server within AAPT’s outsourced infrastructure. VM "sprawl" is one of the key risks that Forrester discusses, and this appears to be a classic example – a virtual server created in haste and soon forgotten about. Commonly, as these devices fall off asset lists, they get neglected – malware and patching updates are skipped and backups are overlooked – yet they still exist on the network. It’s the perfect place for an attacker to sit unnoticed and, if the device exists in a hosted environment, it can also have the negative economic impact of monthly cost and license fees. One anecdote I heard was of a system administrator who, very cautiously and very successfully, disabled around 200 orphaned virtual servers in his organisation – with no negative business impact whatsoever.